The Cloud

Nov 3, 2017 — “The return of Twin Peaks in 2017 came like a Taser shock to the ‘golden age of television,’ overturning audience expectations for what Twin Peaks—and TV—could encompass, both in narrative and form,” writes Aliza Ma in the new issue of...

Oct 25, 2017 — Complete Film Criticism: Reviews, Essays, and Manuscripts, a collection edited by Charles Maland, gathers reviews and features James Agee wrote for The Nation from December 1942 to September 1948 and for Time from September 1942 to November 1948. Jonathan Rosenbaum...

Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...

Dec 12, 2019 — Almost from the moment it arrived on screens in early 2006, Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy was celebrated as a new milestone for American cinema, even an expression of independent filmmaking’s delayed arrival at maturity. In relating its deceptively simple tale...

Oct 7, 2015 — It’s night in the desert. Mike (River Phoenix), a teenage hustler given to bouts of narcolepsy, and Scott (Keanu Reeves), a slumming preppy prince, are huddled over a campfire. “I just want to kiss you, man,” says Mike softly. The...

Oct 15, 2050 — Voice-over narration has existed since the beginnings of cinema and has been an integral part of some of the great masterworks of narrative film, from The Magnificent Ambersons to Double Indemnity to Jules and Jim to Taxi Driver. It spans...

Sep 19, 2023 — Franz Kafka’s The Trial, the unfinished tale of a man living under arrest and prosecution for an unspecified offense, is perhaps the iconic author’s most paradigmatic text. Following its posthumous publication in 1925, and its translation into English by Willa...

May 27, 2010 — Dismiss from your mind, momentarily at least, the John Ford we know, who could define himself with the three words “I make westerns.” Before Stagecoach (1939), Ford’s talking pictures played out in submarines, penitentiaries, and Scottish castles, in Mesopotamia, colonial...

Oct 16, 2006 — Screenwriter Carlos Cuarón delves into the character played by Astrid Hadad

Sep 13, 2004 — About a year and a half ago, a friend and I found ourselves exiled to a cold Midwestern city, where we spent most of our time missing the lazy Texas college town that shaped our idea of the good life....